Wednesday, March 25, 2015 

Two reports and an attempt to link them.

For today's post, shall we compare and contrast two cases which on the surface have absolutely nothing in common but I would argue in fact do speak of the way power operates in this wonderful nation of ours?  Not like I can sink much lower, nor have I anything better to do with my time.

First then to the Independent Police Complaints Commission's report into the shooting of Mark Duggan.  Back in January of last year the inquest jury reached a verdict of lawful killing, based on how the officer he was shot by, known only as V53, was justified in the belief that Duggan was armed and about to fire.  This was despite also finding that Duggan was in fact not armed, and had thrown the gun over the railings near to where the taxi he had been in was stopped as soon as he left the vehicle.

This apparent cognitive dissonance raised the ire of Duggan's family, quite understandably.  The publication of the IPCC report has had much the same result, despite it reaching a slightly different, arguably even more inflammatory conclusion, based on its own investigations and the various legal proceedings.

When it comes down it, the entire dispute about what did or didn't happen between Mark Duggan getting out of the taxi he was in, subjected to a "hard stop" by CO19, and his being shot by V53, concerns 4 seconds.  The IPCC finds that within 4 seconds of getting out of the car he had been fatally shot (finding 12, page 450 of the report), with V53 firing two rounds.  They also find that in the space of these 4 seconds, the other officers most likely did inform him to stop, although there wasn't enough evidence to conclude they identified themselves as armed police (finding 14, page 458), that Duggan moved from the side of the car round to the back, that he did move his right arm in a way that made V53 believe he was getting ready to aim the gun at him and fire, and that this movement was in fact Duggan throwing the gun away.

Essentially, after nearly four years of investigating, the IPCC has accepted nearly in its entirety the police account of what happened.  As it all but admits, it was almost impossible to reach any other conclusion as there were no independent witnesses to the shooting itself, or at least none who had a clear view at a short distance.  The taxi driver changed his account of the shooting itself, and could only see Duggan's back.  Despite the CO19 officers refusing to be interviewed, with them conferring together on their account, the IPCC declares there to be no "objective evidence which undermines the account of V53" (page 476).  That there was "no DNA attributable to Mr Duggan on the firearm or sock" is dismissed as it's possible to handle an item without leaving such material.  The IPCC also declares that as another officer was behind Duggan, this "tends to support V53’s assertion ...as W42 could have been seriously injured or killed if the bullet had not fortuitously embedded itself in his radio".  This would seem to this layman to be an entirely subjective conclusion based on an assumption of V53's professionalism, but it most likely wouldn't have made any difference if W42 hadn't been behind Duggan.

As to how the gun got to where it did, we're still none the wiser.  No one saw the gun being thrown by Duggan, not V53, who thought it was being moved in his direction only to find it had disappeared once he had fired, nor W70, the only other officer to say he saw Duggan with the gun.  The IPCC suggests most of the other officers were distracted by the shots and the "explosion" of the "plume of down feathers" from Duggan's jacket (page 486), and they didn't have the best line of sight anyway.  

Again, the IPCC makes some eyebrow-raising suggestions as to how the accounts given by the officers suggest they're telling the truth: while "it is surprising that none of the officers saw the firearm leave Mr Duggan’s hand and travel to the grassed area ... had the officers ... been in collusion to provide corroborative evidence linking Mr Duggan to the position of the firearm, it is likely that they would have claimed to have seen this".  Also, had Duggan not in fact had the gun in his hand at all, "there is no sensible reason why they [the police] would have opted to plant the firearm on the grass such a distance away from Mr Duggan thereby giving rise to the various doubts which have inevitably arisen about this matter".  This to the IPCC is "implausible" (page 485).

None of this is to suggest that the IPCC was wrong to reach the only possible conclusion based on the evidence they had.  The most likely explanation for why Duggan, instead of surrendering, probably did go to throw away the gun is that he didn't realise the officers following the taxi were from CO19.  The report sets out he sent a Blackberry broadcast which mentioned "Trident" officers (page 459), who are usually unarmed.  The only person who knows what really happened in those 4 seconds between Duggan leaving the taxi and his being fatally shot is V53, and on his conscience it must lie.  You do however recall how differently the police acted when called to the scene of the murder of Lee Rigby, with his attackers proceeding to run towards the officers.  Despite being well aware of how dangerous they were, neither of the men were shot with the intention to kill.

To give the IPCC some credit, it does recommend that all radio communications during covert firearm operations should be recorded, as should all armed response vehicles be fitted with in car data recording systems, while the "feasibility of fitting audio/visual recording devices in covert armed response vehicles" should also be explored.  That said, it's surprising this isn't already standard practice, and surely the issuing of armed officers with headcams would go a long way to clearing up any disputes.

And so, far more briefly, to the other major report of the day.  Yes, the sad demise of Mr Clarkson, as prompted by the investigation by Ken MacQuarrie (PDF).  Clarkson's fracas was we learn more of a 20-minute tantrum, involving the strongest of language and various insults directed at Oisin Tymon, ending with a 30-second assault that resulted in the producer going to hospital.  That Clarkson in effect grassed himself up, apologised profusely and repeatedly, including in person quite rightly made no odds.

Unlike it seems most lefties I've never minded Clarkson and even more shocking, I quite enjoy the Top Gear specials.  The show proper I'm indifferent towards, but in feature length format Clarkson, May and Hammond acting like children in foreign climes passes the time, cleverly scripted or not.  That I feel this way and can still absolutely adore Stewart Lee is to apparently be very odd indeed.

As is so often the case, it's the fans that are worse than the act.  When you get over a million people signing a petition demanding the immediate reinstatement of someone in a position of authority alleged to have punched a junior colleague, you can both dismiss some of it as larking about and a bit of fun, many of whom now probably accept the sacking of Clarkson is the right decision in the circumstances, as well as also conclude that an awful lot of people think it's perfectly fine for someone in power to act like a dick so long as they like them.  Except it's not just that: because Clarkson is "politically incorrect", a "dinosaur" as he described himself, the BBC were never going to be satisfied until such a person was expunged, nor were his critics.  We even had, lord preserve us, David Cameron passing comment just hours after he had criticised Ed Miliband for demanding to know why he wouldn't debate him as "focusing on the future of a television programme".

It's this concentration on the ephemera, the apparent belief that some should have impunity on the basis of who they are, and a sense of entitlement that leads many to believe they are being persecuted as not everything is always about them that says much of why so little has changed since the riots prompted by Mark Duggan's death.  Duggan himself probably wasn't a pleasant man all told; those who rioted initially might have been outraged by his death and the initial police response, but you can hardly claim what followed was a political response; and besides, the police have been found twice now to have acted properly, discrepancies or not.  

The above is probably accurate, but even if it wasn't there would have been politicians, pundits and public alike lining up to defend the police's right to shoot dead someone they believed to be dodgy.  It's why despite all the deaths in custody, the Irishmen with chair legs in plastic bags, the Brazilians who "leapt the barriers" and those in the wrong place at the wrong time, no police officer has been convicted of murder or manslaughter in nearly 30 years.  It's not just we're brought up to respect authority, or that some people apologise for, even take pleasure from others acting viciously so long as it's against those they don't like, it's also that more people than we care to admit are just unpleasant and have really unpleasant, repellent opinions.  And far too often, rather than being challenged, they're indulged.

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3/25/2015 10:38:00 pm | |

Wednesday, January 08, 2014 

Unanswered questions, familiar findings.

Of all the things you could have spent the last 4 months of your life doing, it's a pretty safe bet serving on the jury at the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan would rank at the very bottom of most lists.  To say you can't envy the 10 members of the jury would be putting it extremely lightly; whichever verdict they reached there would be have been major repercussions.  Had they found he was unlawfully killed, it's difficult to believe the Met wouldn't have reacted in the way they have in the past to jury verdicts going against them.  Members of CO19 downed tools after a jury found Harry Stanley to have been unlawfully killed, Stanley having been gunned down while being both Irish and carrying a chair leg in a plastic bag, the armed response teams happily returning to work after a judge overturned the inquest's findings.

The verdict the jury has reached however is just about the most inflammatory one possible.  They concluded by majority verdict that while Duggan had not been holding the gun when he was shot dead by officer V53, V53 was justified in believing that he needed to use force to defend himself as he genuinely thought Duggan was armed and about to fire.  Duggan was therefore lawfully killed.  The response from Mark Duggan's family, one of fury, is more than understandable.  V53 was not the only officer to testify that Duggan had been holding the gun when he exited the cab after the police conducted a "hard stop" on the vehicle; W70 also did, with both then saying the gun disappeared after the shooting.  W70's initial statement did not mention Duggan holding a gun though, with the officer saying in court he withheld it on legal advice, as this initial statement was not supposed to contain such details.

Where the jury's verdict is most likely to be challenged at a judicial review, and also where it collapses into a whole mess of contradictions is on how the gun got from the shoebox Duggan collected it in to behind a fence around 10 to 20 feet from where he died.  The jury's majority verdict by 8 to 2 was that Duggan threw it as soon as the minicab came to a stop, while one of the other two decided he threw it whilst on the pavement evading the police, leaving the last juror to decide that as no witness gave evidence that Duggan had done either he could not support either supposition.  Indeed, not only did Duggan manage to throw the gun without any bystanders or the police in pursuit seeing him, both the gun and the sock had no fingerprints or DNA evidence from Duggan on them.  The shoebox, by contrast, did have his fingerprints on it.  One officer specifically gave evidence that had Duggan thrown it he would have seen it, while Professor Jonathan Clasper gave evidence that as Duggan was shot first in the bicep, rather than in the chest as V53 testified, it would have been "very unlikely" he would have been able to have thrown it the distance it was found away.

If, then as the jury found Duggan had already thrown the gun away, how was it that not one but two police officers were certain that he still had it, only for it to disappear once he was dead?  Witness B gave evidence that Duggan had in fact been holding a mobile phone when he was shot.  Witness B also filmed 9 minutes of footage which he "sold" to the BBC (going by the Graun's reporting of the counsel for the officers, as I doubt the BBC did pay for it) of the aftermath of the shooting, at the time contradicting his later evidence by telling the reporter he thought he had been holding a gun.  The inquest heard that Duggan had been talking on a mobile phone 10 seconds before he was shot, yet there hasn't been much reporting on where the phone was found, or whether the officers could have mistaken it for a gun.  It would be one thing for one of the officers to do so, but for two seems unlikely.

It's not as unlikely however as the narrative we're meant to accept.  As no witness saw Duggan throw the gun, either before he got out of the cab or as he was shot, I can't see how the jury could make an informed decision as to how it got where it was found.  Whether that's a mistake on the part of the coroner in asking them to reach a decision, or on the jury for doing so might yet be decided in another court.

The jury was nonetheless entitled to find Duggan had been lawfully killed as they accepted V53's overall account of what happened, that he felt threatened and believed Duggan was about to shoot, even while finding he didn't have a gun. V53 was wrong about where he first shot Duggan, and about the colour of the cab, yet neither it seems was enough to make them doubt his evidence sufficiently to reach an open verdict. It's also not surprising when a jury is always likely to accept the word of an officer when there were no other independent witnesses close by, the cab driver's evidence contradictory, while Witness B was over 100 metres away.  From the time Duggan left the cab to being shot dead just 10 seconds went by, and while it's difficult to see how V53 could be so certain about the movements he thought Duggan was making in order to justify shooting him, it again isn't surprising they came down in the police's favour.

Little however it seems was learned from past tragedies and shootings involving the Met.  While nowhere near on the scale of the "complete and utter fuck-up" which was the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Met are once again describing a death they were involved in as being "by a thousand fuckups".  The jury found the police did not do enough to "gather and react to the intelligence" that Duggan was due to collect the gun, while in the aftermath we again heard the usual subsequently proved wrong claims that Duggan had shot at the police.  The crime scene was improperly secured, and handed over to the Independent Police Complaints Commission late, while the cab itself was driven away from the scene before later being brought back.  The officers themselves were, as in the de Menezes case, allowed to confer and write up their statements together, while they refused to answer the IPCC's questions, only giving written statements.  The IPCC is now set to be further reformed, but whether it will make much of a difference if officers are still to be allowed to confer before giving their statements remains to be seen.

The reaction of some to the verdict, best seen in the comments to David Lammy's piece that covers all the bases, reminds of the exact same calls we heard at the height of the riots that followed Duggan's death.  Regardless of how involved Duggan was with a sub-section of the Tottenham Man Dem, and the police likely have exaggerated it to a certain extent, when someone is killed by the police and there are unanswered questions about what happened, there has to be a swift response to such concerns.  That clearly didn't happen in August 2011, and what followed, even if not fully connected, were the worst riots in 30 years.  The exact reason why there were such suspicions is precisely because we've seen it all before, and while on this occasion the most likely explanation is the one reached by the jury, even if no one saw Duggan throw the gun, an unarmed man was killed when he should still be alive today.  There were never going to be any winners, but it's hard not to feel extremely hollow about today's verdict, and whatever happens from today, a dark piece of modern British history is still not yet over.

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1/08/2014 10:09:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 19, 2012 

No alarms and no surprises redux.

Hearing today of the verdict in the Ian Tomlinson case, it was difficult not to be reminded of Blackstone's formulation. William Blackstone, the 18th century author of the Commentary on the Laws of England, had it that it was better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

This is not to say that PC Simon Harwood was guilty of anything more on the 1st of April 2009 than common assault. The jury more than understandably decided that it was not proven beyond reasonable doubt that Harwood caused the manslaughter of Tomlinson, and we have to respect that decision. You really can't envy those chosen to serve on this particular case, thanks to the incompetence of Freddy Patel, the pathologist who carried out the first autopsy on Tomlinson. They had to reach their decision based on conflicting accounts: Patel continues to maintain that Tomlinson died of natural causes, coincidentally just a matter of minutes after he was pushed over and struck by Harwood, while the two other doctors who subsequently carried out a re-examination decided the cause of death was internal bleeding caused by trauma associated with a blow to the abdomen. The material that would have established the cause beyond all doubt was poured away by Patel, who when giving evidence continued to insist that the bloody fluids found within Tomlinson's stomach cavity were ascites stained with blood, rather than just blood. The Crown Prosecution Service's initial decision not to bring charges was justified on this irreconcilable difference of medical opinions. The jury was not told that Patel had been suspended last year by the General Medical Council after similar failings in the autopsy he carried out on Sally White, who he found had died of natural causes. Her body had been discovered in the house belonging to Anthony Hardy, who later pleaded guilty to the murder of White and two other women.

In fairness to Patel, he wasn't aware when he conducted the post-mortem of what had happened to Tomlinson just a few minutes before he died, the footage not being uncovered until it was sent to the Guardian a week after the protests. New evidence was also presented during the trial which hadn't been given during the inquest, with trauma specialist Alastair Wilson hypothesising that the internal bleeding could have started before Tomlinson came into contact with Harwood. All the same, it still raises the question of why it was decided that Patel's suspension was considered to be prejudicial, and so withheld from the jury. It may not have made any difference, just as it's doubtful that had they known of Harwood's chequered disciplinary record, including his resignation from the Met following a road rage incident and subsequent rejoining of the force with Surrey police it would have changed their decision. When it was a majority decision of 10 to 2 though, after four days of deliberations, it could potentially have led to a retrial instead of a not guilty verdict.

All this considered, it was clearly the right decision by the CPS to change their initial decision and bring the manslaughter charges following the unlawful killing verdict of the inquest's jury. While both verdicts were delivered under the same burden of proof, beyond reasonable doubt, there's clearly a massive difference between a jury deciding a police officer was guilty of unintentionally killing a man through inappropriate use of force and a jury deciding that the police officer should potentially go to prison for doing so. Harwood's behaviour, though reprehensible as there was no reason whatsoever for him to push Tomlinson, would have been unlikely to have done lasting damage to someone who was in good health. Indeed, as I previously noted, it's a wonder there weren't far worse injuries on the day considering the number of protesters who were hit repeatedly on the head with batons.

In this respect, as much as Harwood on the day was lashing out anyone who got in his way following the humiliation he felt after failing to arrest a man who vandalised a police van, Duncan Campbell is right to lay the blame at the feet of those who authorised the completely counter-productive tactic of kettling protesters, to say nothing of the storming of the Climate Camp, later ruled to have been an abuse of power. Regardless of whether there had been violence or not, and much of it on the day was limited to the smashing of windows and spraying of grafitti rather than attacks on police, who were in any case mostly watching as it went on, officers had been briefed that a bunch of black flag wielding anarchists were coming from across Europe to lay waste to the City, while senior officers were telling the media of how ready they were for just such an eventuality.

Unlike some others, I'm not so sure that this verdict will make police officers feel that they're above the law: while it's true that there has still not been a officer convicted of murder or manslaughter while on duty since 1986, it only hasn't in this case thanks to the disagreement between pathologists. With recording equipment now ubiquitous, the chances of abuse going unchallenged have also never been slighter. Just as the police are so keen on recording us, so on protests from now on we should be recording their every move. And considering what's happened, they can hardly complain.

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7/19/2012 06:54:00 pm | |

Wednesday, May 04, 2011 

No alarms and no surprise revisited.

If it wasn't apparent before, it ought to be now. The real reason why it's such a rare occurrence for police officers who've killed members of the public while on duty to face trial is because when the facts of similar cases are laid out before juries, whether in the form of health and safety prosecutions or inquests, they have this irritating habit of finding either the defendants guilty or that the victim was unlawfully killed.

This isn't to suggest that the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, who made his name as lawyer working on human rights cases conspired with the police when he decided that PC Simon Harwood would not face any criminal charges over his assault on Ian Tomlinson. Rather, it seems he fell into the trap of believing that it would be too difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that the actions of the officer lead directly to the Tomlinson's death. Considering the differences of opinion between the pathologists, with the first, Dr Freddy Patel ruling that Tomlinson had died from a heart attack rather than internal bleeding caused after he fell following being pushed, it would have hardly been an easy case, and one on which there would have been much media attention.

Nonetheless, and indeed exactly because as the Guardian puts it there is nothing more serious than the state taking the life of one of its subjects with the exception of agents of the state covering just such an incident up, Starmer ought to have erred on the side of letting a jury hear all the evidence. Such a case would have been clearly in the public interest. The virtues of taking just such a nuanced approach could hardly have been more vindicated than by the inquest into Tomlinson's death, helmed by Judge Peter Thornton QC. Unlike in the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes where the coroner disgracefully decided that the jury could not reach a verdict of unlawful killing, Thornton gave the jury the option, while stressing that they had to be certain beyond reasonable doubt, the same legal distinction as that required in a criminal trial. Having expected a longer wait, the court was relatively startled when the jury took just under three and a half hours to decide that Tomlinson had been unlawfully killed.

Considering the evidence presented, this wasn't exactly surprising. PC Simon Harwood himself was almost the definition of an unreliable witness, repeatedly changing his story when it was challenged, not just by the lawyers for Tomlinson's family, but also by the quality and quantity of the material shot on the day of the G20 protests. Having initially claimed to investigators that Tomlinson had been defiant and resisting orders when he pushed him, he still maintained that the strike and push which felled him were justified in the circumstances, rather than say prodding him, taking him by the shoulders and physically moving him away, or, heaven forfend, forcefully but politely asking him to move faster. Whether or not Harwood, who in the minutes before pushing Tomlinson had swung a coat at a protester, knocked over a BBC cameraman and used a "palm strike" against someone else, was acting out his anger and embarrassment following his failure to arrest a man who had vandalised a police van is known only to him.

Similarly, Dr Freddy Patel was left with little option than to change his original opinion faced with the three other pathologists and other medical experts all deciding that Tomlinson's cause of death was abdominal bleeding. Patel was admittedly put at a disadvantage from the very beginning, the police having told him when he was brought in to perform the post-mortem that Tomlinson had not been involved in any public disorder and that he had sleeping rough for the last 20 years, just one of the many untruths originally put out to the media by the Met, along with the claim that they had been assaulted with missiles while tending to Tomlinson. Even so, Patel erred in not retaining or sampling the three litres of intra-abdominal fluid blood or intra-abdominal fluid with blood which had collected in Tomlinson's abdomen, which would have proved the key to whether he had died from internal bleeding as the other pathologists believed. In any case, that Patel had previously been criticised for discussing confidential details in public, as well as being involved in the failings concerning Anthony Hardy ought to have disqualified him from any possibility of carrying out the autopsy.

As wearingly familiar as this sad tale of changing stories, incompetence and abuses of power is, the real outrage is that the overall cause remains the same. Just as the officers on the morning of the 22nd of July 2005 were briefed that those they were after were "up for it" and ready to commit acts of mass murder, giving the impression that lethal force was permissible even when it hadn't been authorised, so the police prior to the G20 had made clear just how determined they were to crack down hard on those who were out to smash up the City. We duly saw police medics brandishing batons, those without the first idea how to "safely" use a truncheon flinging it around, and of course, the storming of the entirely peaceful Climate Camp, since found to have been illegal. Ian Tomlinson died both as he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and because he was vulnerable to just such an injury as he received; dozens of others got cracked heads or worse just for daring to take part in a demonstration. It would be nice to think that following such regrettable incidents that future policing would have been rethought, but no, as the example of Alfie Meadows so pungently demonstrates.

Whether Simon Harwood will now face a manslaughter charge following the CPS review remains to be seen. Doubtless his representatives will argue that the inquest and the coverage of it has damaged his chances of receiving a fair trial. What hopefully will change is the giving of the benefit of the doubt to the police and the authorities when such prosecutions are first considered, something which has gone on for far too long, as does the condescending view that juries are incapable of following or making a judgement on complicated, conflicting medical evidence. Justice, even if it involves the throwing out of cases by judges or acquittals which result in questions over whether a prosecution should have been brought, has to been seen to be done.

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5/04/2011 10:46:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 22, 2010 

No alarms and no surprises.

Hands up those surprised in the slightest that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided that no charges will be brought against the Metropolitan police over the death of Ian Tomlinson? None of you? Jolly good. Finally, maybe, the message is now starting to get into the thick skulls of everyone that whenever the police, either accidentally or in the most brutal manner imaginable kill members of the public that it's only in incredibly rare circumstances that the officers themselves face prosecution. The only example in recent memory of a police officer facing a charge of both murder and manslaughter as a result of their actions while on duty was in the case of James Ashley, who was shot dead in his bedroom during a botched police raid back in 1998. The officer was acquitted of both charges when the judge agreed that he had acted in self-defence, believing he was about to be shot himself. This was despite Ashley being naked, acting in a daze as he had just been woken up, and having no weapon to hand. Last year Sussex police apologised to Ashley's family, admitted negligence and paid compensation.

Since then, no further charges in similar cases have been forthcoming. There were none when 10 bullets were pumped into the head and shoulder of Jean Charles de Menezes, the end result of an operation which was memorably described by a Met source as a "complete and utter fuck-up", although there was the small matter of the successful prosecution against the Met on health and safety grounds. There were none when Harry Stanley was shot dead, a Scotsman described to the police as an Irishman carrying a shotgun in a plastic bag which turned out to be a chair leg. Indeed, even though no officer was actually charged with a criminal offence, when the second inquest into his death resulted in a verdict of unlawful killing and the officers responsible were suspended from duty, their colleagues in other armed response units took umbrage and handed their weapons in. Happily, the High Court later overturned the second inquest's result, reinstated the first's open verdict and everything was right with the world again. There were also none when a CO19 officer shot dead Azelle Rodney, despite the Independent Police Complaints Commission agreeing that he was not holding a weapon when the car he was in was surrounded.

In all of those cases the evidence was far more clear-cut than that against the officer who pushed over Ian Tomlinson. True, they all claimed they were acting in self-defence, believing in the case of de Menezes that he was a suicide bomber about to detonate his explosives, while the others believed they were in mortal danger from armed men, something which PC Simon Harwood, as he has been named, clearly couldn't, threatened so visibly as he was by Tomlinson walking away from him and the other officers with his back turned and hands in his pockets. It was always going to be difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt in a court that the baton strike and push unequivocally led to Tomlinson's death and so justify a charge of manslaughter against Harwood. That was without the conflicting evidence of the 3 post-mortems.

Here's where it gets murky. Dr Freddy Patel, the pathologist who carried out the first autopsy, had previously been criticised by the General Medical Council for discussing confidential details about a man who died in police custody outside of an inquest. He had also performed the post-mortem on Sally White, a 38-year-old woman whose body was found in a locked bedroom in the home of Anthony Hardy, a death initially deemed by the police as suspicious. Patel's verdict was White had died from heart disease, and the investigation was dropped. Hardy subsequently pleaded guilty to the murder of three women, including White. Patel has since been charged with misconduct by the GMC over three other post-mortems he is alleged to have conducted incompetently.

He may eventually face a fifth, if he isn't struck off at the conclusion of the current hearing. Crucially, while concluding that Tomlinson had died from natural causes as a result of coronary artery disease, Patel recorded but did not retain or sample 3 litres of either intraabdominal fluid blood or intraabdominal fluid with blood which had collected in Tomlinson's abdomen. His first report suggested the former, but in a second submitted on the 6th of April this year he settled on the latter. If it was blood, according to the Crown Prosecution Service's statement, that would have been highly significant indicator as to the cause of death. However, when meeting the prosecution team, Patel maintained it mainly consisted of ascites, having formed in Tomlinson's damaged liver, which had been stained with blood. He didn't retain or sample it as he had handled blood his entire professional life and was convinced it was ascites stained with blood rather than just blood. Moreover, he had found no internal rupture which could have led to such a level of blood loss. The doctors who conducted the second and third post-mortems, while acknowledging that Tomlinson had a partially blocked artery, concluded that he had died as a result of abdominal haemorrhage from blunt force trauma to the abdomen, in association with alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. They believed that when Tomlinson had fell following being pushed, his elbow had impacted in the area of his liver causing an internal bleed and leading directly to his death a matter of minutes later. The only way to be certain would have been to re-examine the fluid initially found by Patel and which he had removed without retaining. For Tomlinson to have died so quickly from blood loss there would have had to have been some kind of internal rupture, something found by none of the doctors. Since Patel was the only doctor to examine Tomlinson's intact body, he was in the best position to have considered the fluid and found a rupture, leaving the CPS to decide the differences between the doctor's opinions was irreconcilable.

The key question is why Patel was chosen to conduct the post-mortem in the first place. It's believed he didn't have a police contract at the time, yet instead of an accredited team of 9 pathologists who more usually deal with suspicious deaths, he was picked by City of London coroner Paul Matthews. At the time the City of London police were handling the investigation rather than the Independent Police Complaints Commission, who despite the circumstances of the death during the G20 protests let them get on with it, not getting involved until the Guardian posted the footage of Tomlinson being pushed over online. Proving there was an active conspiracy to chose an incompetent pathologist will be next to impossible; even if the City of London police were willing to overlook the shortcomings of their colleagues in the Met, and already knew about what was likely to have happened, would their coroner have took part in a cover-up too? The trusty blade of Occam's razor would instead suggest it's more likely to have been incompetence and cock-up, especially when they would have had to depend on Patel either playing along or performing his usual shoddy job, not always guaranteed. That's not to say it couldn't have happened, just less plausible than the alternative.

Clearly, the IPCC should have been in charge from the beginning, although their record is hardly sparkling either. Even so, as the Guardian argues, even with the inherent difficulties in a prosecution case it should have been up for a jury to hear the contradictory post-mortem evidence and make a decision, especially when Patel's standing as a pathologist is so under question. That not even an attempt has been made to prosecute Harwood with assault on the grounds the legal limit for doing so had long since passed is disgraceful. How many other cases involving members of the public are lost each year due to the incredibly short six month timeframe for charges being brought? The pathologist who carried out the second post-mortem has also disputed the CPS's justification for not bringing charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm saying the injuries which they called minor were in fact more serious, involving a large area of bruising.

This is without considering the crucial test of turning the tables. If a member of the public had hit and then pushed over an on-duty police officer who had their back turned to them, who subsequently died a matter of minutes later, would the CPS then be so reticent in bringing charges, even if there was a similar dispute over the cause of death? While the inquest is still to come, it seems for now that yet again the police have got away scot-free after being involved with a death of an entirely innocent bystander. Public confidence in the police, the CPS and the IPCC relies on their best practice and independence. When on so many separate occasions they seem determined to ignore what is staring them in the face and accept in good faith everything they're told by the police while casting doubt on anything that contradicts those statements it starts to look like collusion. And then the media, police and all right-thinking people wonder how Raoul Moat could possibly be sympathised with, let alone lionised.

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7/22/2010 11:01:00 pm | |

Thursday, June 03, 2010 

A strange report and another travesty of justice.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission's report on the Metropolitan police's handling of their investigation into the murder of Rachel Nickell is a strange document (PDF). Strange in that it is both so short, running to just 28 sparse pages, with little real detail, and strange in that it decides that none of the officers involved should be named. Ostensibly the reason behind this, although it isn't explained, is presumably because all those involved have either retired from the service or since died.

Why though should this be the case, when the decisions that some of these individuals made had such terrible impacts on the lives, not just on those who may well have died needlessly when leads were failed to be followed up adequately, as the report suggests, but also on Colin Stagg, the man who was completely erroneously targeted and attempted to be fitted up with Nickell's murder? This has the effect of placing the blame on the Met in its entirety, something that the report itself attempts to contradict:

The investigation into Rachel's murder was led by a Detective Chief Inspector supported by a Detective Inspector, although a Detective Chief Superintendent had overall responsibility for the investigation. All three officers have since retired from the MPS. The decisions made and tactics deployed during the investigation are the responsibility of these three officers. Individual officers deployed in any capacity on the investigation team were doing so under their direction.

So why not name them then? The Detective Chief Superintendent was John Bassett, the Chief Inspector was a man named Wickerson, while the Detective Inspector was Keith Pedder. You could make a case for not naming Bassett and Wickerson on the grounds they have since the case not courted publicity or attempted to make money from their role in the investigation, but Keith Pedder most certainly has, having written two books which are still in print, both of which are self-aggrandising accounts which didn't just defend the pursuit of Colin Stagg, but continued to accuse him of being guilty. It was also Bassett that brought in Paul Britton, the criminal profiler, supposedly the man on whom Cracker was modelled, who also escapes being named in the report, despite again profiting from the case through two books.

The report does however provide a couple of revelations. Firstly, that the investigation after Stagg's acquittal was reviewed by another (unnamed) Detective Chief Superintendent, who despite in the usual in-house review fashion of finding nothing amiss, also made recommendations concerning "MPS procedures with regard to the use of offender profiling and the training given to officers". He also recommended that the investigation into Nickell's death should be kept open, despite Paul Condon, the Metropolitan police commissioner saying after Stagg's acquittal that the police weren't looking for anyone else.

It also deals with the gap between 1995 and December 2007, the month in which Robert Napper was finally charged with Nickell's murder. The report puts this down mainly to the advances in working with DNA samples, although it admits that if the "standard" testing had been used then it could have been possible to have obtained a DNA profile at an earlier date. As it was, Stagg's complete innocence was all but established in 2004, when one of the samples from Nickell's body revealed the presence of two distinct profiles. When compared against a number of profiles, including both Stagg's and Napper's, the only match was the latter. It was still a further three years until it was decided the profile provided a prima facie case against Napper, having been repeatedly checked for contamination. The IPCC's conclusion is that because of the failure of the case against Stagg, there was a reluctance on the part of both the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service to take the case to court without substantial verification of the test results. It also mentions "subsequent criticism" after the acquittal of Stagg. Really? The only subsequent criticism was mainly from the tabloids towards the trial judge and the then rule of double jeopardy, such was the conviction that Stagg was guilty. Only Private Eye and some broadsheet journalists repeatedly argued that Stagg was innocent. The reality in fact seems that the Met was determined not to be embarrassed by the revelation that they had persecuted an entirely innocent man, and continued to do so through their all but intertwined relationship with the "popular" press. Only once the officers involved the first time round had long gone was a charge attempted.

The other major insight is that the advice from the Crown Prosecution Service and Treasury Counsel during the honeytrap operation directed against Stagg was that there still wasn't enough evidence to charge him. Despite this, the Met charged him anyway, with the CPS then apparently acquiescing and going along with it. If they really didn't believe the charge was justified at the time, then the CPS quickly changed its tune afterwards, as a leaked internal CPS report attacked the judge for having presumably exactly the same concerns as they initially had.

In the same way, the report sets out that while the police were willing to believe in the slightest of circumstantial evidence linking Stagg to Nickell, they completely ignored that which connected Napper. Both Paul Foot and the front page of the Daily Mail no less asked at the time of Napper's guilty plea to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility for the murders of Samantha and Jazmine Bisset whether he could have also have killed Nickell, and the report sets out that a tool box found in his home had red paint which matched the flakes found in Nickell's son Alex's hair, a shoe which had a similar sole to that of a print found at the scene of the murder, and also an A to Z map with markings on it directly adjacent to Wimbledon Common, showing the he was familiar with the area. When interviewed at the time Napper admitted that he had probably taken leave from work the week of Nickell's murder, but denied ever going to Wimbledon, and while a profile was drawn up involving Napper, the profiler was of the opinion that Napper was not the killer. The continuing belief that Stagg was guilty probably ensured that until the case was reviewed again in 2001 there was never a chance that Napper could have been charged sooner.

The report's ultimate conclusion is that the Metropolitan police has moved on to such an extent since 1992, alongside improvements involving DNA sampling that there is no need for any formal recommendations. Indeed,

[P]olicy, practice and technical ability have all improved vastly since Rachel Nickell’s death and I certainly do believe that things have changed beyond recognition.

Its only recommendation is that the Met should formally issue a public, unreserved apology to Andre Hanscombe and his son with Nickell, Alex, something which it today did. The Met did in fact also apologise to Nickell's friends and family as the same time as it did to Colin Stagg, and also did so privately, but has nonetheless repeatedly that today.

Whether the Met has been transformed to such an extent as the IPCC believes is only a partial comfort. Fact is, there are mistakes and then there are categorical refusals to explore alternatives; based on the profile provided by the legend that was Paul Britton, the Met was determined to convict Colin Stagg by any means, resorting to entrapment. When its methods were exposed and rejected by a judge, it didn't re-evaluate and reinvestigate; it instead briefed the ever pliable press that a murderer had got off on a technicality and let the trail go cold until it was reviewed by a new team in 2001. At the very least, those who were personally responsible for all those decisions should have been named in this report. That they weren't is a travesty of justice, another to add to the long line involving Nickell, Napper and Stagg.

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6/03/2010 10:46:00 pm | |

Thursday, March 05, 2009 

Remembering the case of James Ashley.

Everyone, sadly, knows the name Jean Charles de Menezes. Probably not enough know the name Harry Stanley. Even less probably know about, or considering the length of time since his shooting, remember the name of James Ashley, his family formally apologised to today. His case however shows just how little the police learnt from the tragedy which befell him.

Ashley, it must be said, had at best both an unpleasant past and some unsavoury friends. He had served 2 years for manslaughter and had been involved in a stabbing in the pub, although it subsequently turned out that he had pulled the perpetrator off the victim.

Police intelligence was that there was a large amount of drugs in the house, and that it was highly likely that Ashley would be armed and dangerous. On the 22nd of July 2005, the armed officers that were to shoot de Menezes were told in their briefing that they were likely to encounter individuals that were "deadly and determined" and "up for it", despite the fact that all the failed bombers were on the run and had no further explosives to fall back on. Similarly, the intelligence turned out to be completely wrong in the case of the Kamal family, and while we have never subsequently learned definitively exactly what it was they expected to find in their house in Forest Gate (suggestions included that it was some sort of "dirty" device, or an explosive with some sort of chemical substance), allegations have also been made that the intelligence came from a highly dubious source.

The raid itself occurred in the early hours of the morning, as it did in Forest Gate. This is standard police procedure, as between 4 and 6am is when those targeted are felt most likely to be at home. This approach has the downside that unless the police make clear who they are, and this itself has the downside that it makes those inside attempt to flee before the police have succeeded in breaking in, that the occupants often fall under the impression that they're being burgled. This was what James Ashley thought, as did the brothers in Forest Gate. The other obvious thing about conducting raids in the early morning is the problem of the light: this was crucial in both the raid in Forest Gate and in the one which led to Ashley's death. In Forest Gate, Abdulkahar came pounding down the stairs as the police were coming up them; the officer, with only the light from his weapon for guidance, thought that someone was pulling at his arm and probably due to the bulkiness of the chemical suit he was wearing, ended up discharging his weapon, something that ought to have been foreseen (PDF). In the tragic case of Ashley, the officers had been disoriented by the plan of the house, knocking into an ironing board and also coming across an unexpected communal door. Fatefully, when an officer entered James' bedroom, again in the dark, he thought that James, having been woken and in a daze staggering towards the door, was about to attack him and so fired his weapon, killing him.

James had been in bed and was naked when he was shot. He had no weapon to hand, and only an airgun was found in the subsequent search. Also found was a small quantity of cannabis. He was found not to have links to the drug ring he had been suspected of belonging to. It was, to quote what an officer said to the Guardian in regards to the shooting of de Menezes, "a complete and utter fuck-up."

If this was as far as the fuck-up went, it might not have been so bad. Yet just as in the examples of the Forest Gate raid and the Stockwell shooting, the police either gave information which turned out to be wrong to the media or at worst actively conducted smear operations against those shot. Paul Whitehouse, the then chief constable of Sussex police, conducted a press conference in which he claimed that Ashley was wanted for attempted murder, that the raid was professionally planned and that the use of firearms was proportionate. A subsequent report conducted by Sir John Hoddinott under the auspices of the Police Complaints Authority, the forerunner to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which has never been published, found that Whitehouse had "wilfully failed to tell the truth as he knew it; he did so without reasonable excuse or justification and what he published and said was misleading and therefore likely to injure the public interest." Whitehouse resigned after the then home secretary David Blunkett suggested that he ought to be sacked to restore public confidence in the force. Perhaps the best that can be said for Whitehouse is that at least he made an active decision to lie about what had happened, having been fully informed of the raid; Sir Ian Blair, on the other hand, did not know that an innocent man had been shot on the 22nd of July until the following morning, when apparently even his secretary knew that was likely to be the case. Menezes was besmirched in any case, alleged to be here illegally when he was not, acting strangely when he had not been, wearing a "bulky jacket" despite it being a warm day, when he had in fact been wearing a light denim jacket, and that he had jumped the barriers at the Stockwell station, when in actuality the police running to catch up with him, having arrived late, were the ones who leaped over them, being confused with de Menezes.

Much the same thing happened to the Forest Gate brothers, with the Murdoch press leading the way and eventually having to apologise for their coverage. The Times and the Sun said they had criminal convictions when they did not, the Sun claimed that the large amount of money found in the house had not been explained, when in fact the police had been told repeatedly that they were keeping it there as it's haram (forbidden) in Islam to use bank accounts which accrue interest, then alleged that the brothers had spat at and insulted soldiers outside the brothers, also completely untrue. Finally, the big gun was brought out: the police leaked to the News of the World that child pornography had been found on a computer and mobile phone seized in the raid on the house. It turned out that this material had been on both devices since before they had been bought, second-hand by the family.

If lessons were meant to have been learned from the shooting of Mr Ashley, then they quite obviously weren't; the opposite seems to be the case. You almost have to wonder if it was or still is common police procedure to cast aspersions on the character of those who are unfortunate to find themselves at the heart of police bungles, knowing full well that once you have planted a seed of doubt in the public's mind, many will still believe it even if it subsequently turns out to be untrue. Right up until the final inquiry into the shooting of de Menezes was released, commenters on newspaper articles were still bringing up his supposed jumping of the barrier and that he wasn't legally here. In almost all the cases the police themselves could have corrected the mistakes, if that's what they were, but chose not to. Whitehouse was eventually held accountable, but no charges were brought over the Forest Gate raid, and while Sir Ian Blair was eventually forced out by Boris Johnson, the prosecution of the Met on health and safety grounds only resulted in a fine that the taxpayer had to be pay, while the coroner at the inquest denied the jury the opportunity to decide whether de Menezes was unlawfully killed, although they did strongly criticise the officers who shot de Menezes over their conflicting stories with that of other witnesses. The hope has to be that the next time an innocent person is shot, as they inevitably will be, that the above does not happen again. That however is all that it is, a hope.

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3/05/2009 10:44:00 pm | |

Thursday, November 08, 2007 

de Menezes: Blair as mendacious and deluded as his namesake.


Finally then, a year and ten months it was first formally finished, we receive the IPCC investigation into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes (PDF).

What once would have been explosive and damning reading has been rendered, both by the leaks and the trial of the Met under health and safety legislation, into something almost familiar. It documents failures at all levels, from the officers conducting the surveillance on the morning all the way up to "Sir" Ian Blair himself.

The one thing that overwhelming sticks out from quickly speed-reading the entire document is that of the differing accounts between both the public witnesses of what happened on the tube train and that of the CO12 Special Branch officers and SO19 firearms officers, the first (section 13) who state the police made no mention of who they were when they entered the train, except from the CO12 officers stating "he's here", and the latter (section 18) who all claim that they shouted "police" or "armed police".

Similarly, Cressida Dick and the others inside "Room 1600" all maintain that de Menezes had been identified as Osman on a number of occasions, up to 5 in all. The CO12 officers (section 12) deny ever making a positive identification; indeed, the chronicle of events suggest that one officer decided it definitely wasn't Osman, while the others were uncertain, and thought that the surveillance should continue as a result. Although one managed to come to the conclusion that de Menezes had distinct "Mongolian eyes", there was never a definite positive given to Room 1600. Again, despite none of the surveillance team mentioning that the suspect was "jumpy" or "nervous", Room 1600 came to believe that de Menezes was agitated and "definitely their man." Dick and Detective Superintendent Boutcher requested that the surveillance team give a number on the scale of 1 to 10 on how sure they were that de Menezes was Osman (section 12.22), a request that the receiver, 'James', said was ridiculous, but said that when he had previously seen him over 15 minutes earlier he thought it was a "good possible". This was taken as "they believe it to be Osman."

Despite all the talk after the death of de Menezes of the police's use of "Operation Kratos", the shoot-to-kill policy on those suspected of being suicide bombers, it was never actually put into effect on the morning of the death. The report does go further into the background of Kratos (section 9) and how it came to be police policy, with there being little to no government input. The only real advice the police sought was that of the Treasury Counsel as to the legality of shooting to kill, which came to the conclusion that it was. One of the IPCC recommendations is that there should have been a public debate prior to the implementation of the policy, but that it wasn't thought necessary, or even worthy of discussion in parliament is an indictment of the secretive way of which the police continue to operate.

Even though Kratos was not in actual operation, de Menezes' fate may well have been sealed by the briefing delivered to the firearms officers at Nightingale Lane police station, which dropped everything but the actual shoot-to-kill policy itself into the mix. The individuals involved in the bombings were described as being "deadly and determined" and "up for it" (section 11.11); never was it mentioned that they might encounter those who were entirely innocent in the course of the day. The two officers who shot de Menezes, referred to as "Charlie 2" and "Charlie 12" in the report both said how they believed it was very likely that they would be asked to "intercept deadly and determined terrorist suicide bombers," in the words of Charlie 2 (section 18.21). Charlie 12 was more verbose (section 18.31):

‘We were possibly about to face subjects who had training and had attempted to commit atrocities on innocent human beings with complete disregard to their own lives. They had prepared devices in order to achieve this. There was a real tangible danger that if we didn’t act quickly and correctly there would be an extreme loss of life”.

Both felt as they entered the tube that de Menezes was about to detonate his explosives and they had no choice but to use deadly force, even though it had not been authorised by any officer. The report asked the Crown Prosecution Service to consider whether the actions of of Charlie 2 and 12 amounted to murder, given their justification for shooting de Menezes. (section 20.74). They decided against. Cressida Dick's abject failure to properly either know what was being sent to Room 1600 from the CO12 team, or to make clear to the SO19 team that she wanted de Menezes arrested and not shot, something she failed to make significantly clear, was of no help. One witness from within Room 1600, as had been leaked, claims that Dick added "at all costs." (section 12.36) Whether, if true, it would have made any difference we'll never know.

The report does possibly help clear up some of the initial eyewitness reports given to the media which were so horribly wrong. Many of the witnesses mistook "Ivor", the officer first on the scene and who grabbed hold of de Menezes for an Asian man, and with him also being thrown and a gun pointed at him, he could have easily been mistaken for the man who was shot.

There are a few more minor points in the report that are interesting or indicative of what already was happening on the scene in the aftermath; the pathologist who was on the scene by 13:33 on the 22nd of July was apparently briefed that de Menezes had vaulted the ticket barrier (section 14.16) and ran down the stairs before being shot after tripping, and included those "facts" in his report. It also notes how officers took statements from some of the witnesses inside nearby pubs while music was playing and with the news of what happened on the TV. One of the witnesses described how an officer tried to influence her statement (section 14.8):

“You have to be careful what you say in this sort of situation, or it will be just one more copper with a family losing his job or worse”.

It also shows how officers were allowed to draw up their statements on what happened together and come to a general consensus, whereas the witnesses were denied any opportunity to do just that.

This report really ought to have been the final nail in the coffin of Sir Ian Blair's term as head of the Met. The most damning condemnation is really reserved for him. The IPCC was not allowed any access to Stockwell tube station until the Monday, following Blair's order that the IPCC should be refused access, sent to the Home Office within an hour of the shooting. If we are to believe that Blair didn't know until the following morning that an innocent man was shot, it can't even be said he was trying to instigate a cover-up; he was simply opposed to the IPCC doing the job they was set up to do. Nick Hardwick, in his statement on the issuing of the report, made clear that the delay in the IPCC being able to investigate led directly to much of the "difficulty" that has faced the Met since then. The fact alone that Blair worsened the situation that the police has faced since the tragic death of de Menezes is reason alone for his resignation or sacking. That he presided over a police force that lied through its teeth, smeared de Menezes on a number of occasions and even now seems to deny that the failures were "systemic" makes him almost as mendacious and deluded as his namesake.

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11/08/2007 09:39:00 pm | |

Monday, February 19, 2007 

de Menezes: Ian Blair cleared, but questions remain.

The Grauniad's been leaked a copy of the IPCC report into Sir Ian Blair's conduct over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and while it clears Blair of knowingly lying, the picture it paints of the chain in command of the Met isn't very flattering, to say the least.

While we still don't know the full chain of events that took place on July the 22nd 2005, mainly because the initial IPCC report, a version of which was leaked to the News of the Screws last year, is unlikely to be released in full until at least the absurd health 'n' safety prosecution of the Met is concluded, what we do know is reasonably damning. While the police were looking for 4 men of North African origin, all dark-skinned, they instead trailed and shot a Brazilian, light-skinned man. Not only was he never ordered to stop, despite what Sir Ian Blair said that day, but he was shot 7 times in the head (and once in the shoulder) with dum-dum bullets without so much as a warning, even though he was being held to the floor and would have been unable to set off any explosives if he had actually been one of the alleged suicide bombers.

As you might expect, after they had picked up the remaining pieces of de Menezes's head and bothered to check his body, they would have quickly realised they had killed someone entirely innocent. Indeed, the report appears to state that by the afternoon (de Menezes was shot dead around 10am) the Met were starting to work on the assumption that their incompetence had lead to the death of the wrong person. Despite this, no one appears to have informed Blair, who at 3:30pm took part in a press conference where he wrongly claimed that de Menezes had been ordered to stop, and that the death was directly linked to the operation to find the failed suicide bombers.

The IPCC report says that this failure to inform their boss of bad news was "incomprehensible". A better description would be scandalous and potentially slanderous. While officers inside the Met knew full well that de Menezes was innocent, the press were being briefed that he had leaped the barrier, had refused to stop, had been wearing a heavy or bulky jacket, and may well have even had a bomb belt. All of these were lies, or misunderstandings, with some members of the public mistaking the officers who had leapt the barriers themselves with de Menezes. We have never, for example, had an explanation to why Mark Whitby, the most widely quoted witness on the day, said that de Menezes had been wearing a padded jacket when he was in fact wearing a light denim jacket. He was understandably distraught, but whether his mistakes were down to this we simply don't know, as he has refused to comment since. Instead, for a whole day (and then for over a year) de Menezes and his family were at worst smeared and at best treated abysmally.

It seems unlikely, unless the report is a lot harsher in full than it's being made out to be that Blair will be forced out because of this. The News of the Screws last year suggested that Blair may well have not been informed because he took "bad news very badly", which is a risible excuse for him not being informed of what had happened, but it appears that his account that he told the truth as he knew it to be is fundamentally accurate.

The real contempt for de Menezes was more in the promotion of Cressida Dick, the officer in charge of the operation on that morning. She was on our screens last week talking about gun crime, an irony that wouldn't have been lost on the de Menezes family. Justice seems unlikely to be done even when we eventually get the first IPCC report, and the lessons that should of been learned from that day's "complete and utter fuck-up" appear to not have been taken to heart.

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2/19/2007 07:09:00 pm | |

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 

Comparing and contrasting the ex-BNP bomber and the Koyairs.

In one of those more happy, not conspiratorial coincidences, the release of the second IPCC report in the police raid on the home of the Koyair brothers and their neighbours (PDF) has nicely complimented the guilty plea of Robert Cottage, a former BNP member, who has pleaded guilty to the possession of explosives.

When police raided his house on 28 September 2006 they discovered 21 types of chemicals which, when combined, could form explosives.

Miss Blackwell said they also uncovered a document called the Anarchy Cookbook, which detailed how to make different types of bombs.

Ball bearings - which the prosecution claim could be used as shrapnel for explosive devices - were also found, along with four air pistols.

After interviewing Mr Cottage, detectives raided Mr Jackson's home on 1 October and found a bow and arrow and two nuclear protection suits.


Up until now, the mass media has been almost silent on this discovery, which at the time was referred to by the local media, around the only part of the fourth estate apart from blogs that reported on the raid, as the biggest ever seizure of bomb-making materials from one home in the country.

Before we get into denouncing the double standards of media, knowing full well if it had been Muslims who had been found with such material instead of two white men that it may well have led the news agenda for a couple of days, Rachel makes a number of good points based on her own digging into the story. It simply seems that it passed the media by - if they had known about from the beginning, they would have made something of it. As it happened, the police also initially played down the raids, so it seems only the local media took any interest, and didn't pass it on to their colleagues in the national press.

The one thing that grates though is the fact that the police seem to have accepted that Cottage was not planning a terrorist attack, and only charged them under the ancient (1883) Explosive Substances Act. Cottage's claim that he believed civil war was coming, a belief similar to those held by extreme-right survivalist militias in the United States, and that he was keeping explosives ready for it, shouldn't be allowed to wash. You can't imagine Islamist extremists getting away with such an excuse in court, nor would the tabloids allow them to.

At least in the case of Cottage and his friend David Jackson, justice seems likely to be done. When it comes to the Koyair brothers, their family and their neighbours, they will go on waiting. While today's second IPCC report is not a whitewash, and is far more critical of the police operation in Forest Gate than Scotland Yard are admitting, as Martin Kettle points out, it still leaves a good few questions. The main one surrounds the intelligence that triggered the raid in the first place. The report says (image because the report doesn't allow text copying for some reason):


As the intelligence has only been provided on a confidential basis, unless it happens to be leaked, it seems we're destined to never know for sure just exactly what the police were expecting to find other than a "highly dangerous explosive device" or a "remote-controlled chemical bomb". The media reports at the time were similarly unsure of what it was the police were looking for. The Daily Mail and Times suggested it was a suicide vest that would also have sprayed out poison, the Sunday Express screamed "ANTHRAX TERROR BOMB HUNT", while the News of the Screws, in the same story that wrongly claimed that one of the brothers had shot the other, reported that it was an "explosive device designed to spray out deadly cyanide".

If the police had been willing to be truly open, they would have released the intelligence in full, with any details which could have identified the source censored. Instead we have to take the IPCC's word for it that the intelligence was both believable and so troubling that it necessitated a raid that was brutal in its execution. It's also worth considering this initial Grauniad report that suggested there had been two months of surveillance before the raid -- how in two months did they not realise that this was an ordinary family with nothing to hide who have since been treated abysmally?

There are also contradictions between the evidence given by the officer identified as hitting Hanif, one of the residents of the adjacent house to the one owned by the Koyair family, and his own account of what happened. Hanif contends that he was hit with the butt of the officer's gun as soon as the police entered the room where he had been sleeping -- the officer maintains that Hanif was failing to comply with directions, and he was afraid he was reaching for something under his bed. The officer in any case falls back on the excuse that he was operating in the face of "extreme threat", even though this was a raid carried out in the early hours of the morning, where all the occupants of both houses had been asleep until the police entered, and that he was operating in the property that was raided only because it was believed that both were connected. While the house was owned by the Koyair family, there was no way to gain access to one from inside the other.

The report does mention the leaking and coverage of the raid, but as commenting on such things is outside its remit, doesn't draw any conclusions. It would have been nice for the IPCC to investigate where the leaking came from, but that seems to have been too much to expect. Instead, we have to draw our conclusions, and judging by the way the Murdoch press in particular set out to "get" the Koyair brothers, suggesting that one of them had a criminal record when he did not, that they had a suspiciously large amount money in cash, even though the family had explained they had it because of their religious belief in not using bank accounts which accrue interest, and then finally, and most damagingly, that one of the brother's computers and phones' had child pornography on. When the CPS failed to prosecute and it emerged there were a lot of questions over just how the pornography appeared on the devices, the Sun still persisted, with an officer telling it that "the images were there and a jury should have decided how they get there".

No one disputes that if there is a clear case of public safety being threatened, then such disruptive and potentially personally destructive raids have to take place regardless of such concerns. However, as the report sets out, the police made little to no allowances for the intelligence being incorrect, and the officers acted throughout almost as if they were above the law. The way in which the media were leaked such defamatory and completely inaccurate information shows the contempt in which the men were treated. They were guilty until proved innocent, and it seems that the police were so determined to find something to use against them that they may have even turned to planting child pornography, something which cannot be proved, but in the circumstances of the operation cannot be easily dismissed as being laughable or conspiratorial.

One can only hope that the recommendations of the report are taken on board. That the events of the last couple of weeks seem to have repeated history, only this time with the Home Office coming under suspicion for the leaking, and with a number of the men accused of terrorism being charged, certainly doesn't inspire confidence in either the police or government to restrain themselves when dealing with such sensitive operations.

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2/13/2007 07:15:00 pm | |

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